Aka “The Science Fair”

Produced by: A.P. Delchi

OVERVIEW:

Remember the heady days of the science fair? Demo parties? People coming together to show off the amazing bits of awesome that they had made in their basement? It’s time to revive this tradition and bring it to the modern day security conference. From an open call to the world, twelve teams representing hackerspaces and maker groups will be selected to come to Las Vegas to compete in four categories in front of a panel of judges to demonstrate what they have accomplished. Awards will be based on cash and hardware provided by sponsors and donations from across the industry.

THE CHALLENGE:

Get your hackerspace, maker group, or team of friends who tinker in your basement and prepare your best projects and innovations to be presented to the BSides Las Vegas conference. This is an open call to groups that have established themselves, or are up and coming and ready to amaze the world. Submission methods are up to the group, but videos, pictures and live demonstrations are suggested. The call for submissions will be seeking entries for the following categories:

Category One: Things that make things.

Did your group build a 3D printer, laser cutter, CNC device or some other piece of awesome that helps you make other things? What did you do with it after you built it? For example some folks have built 3D printers and used them to fabricate parts from skateboard wheels to carrying cases. Show us what you built, and what you built with it!

Category Two: Biohacking

Has your group experimented in gene splicing, implants, aeroponics, automated hydroponics, biofuels or other such biologically inspired projects? Bring your beakers and your Jacobs ladders to the people who rarely hear about such things. Innovations such as a kit to test food to see if it contains GMOs, Innovative home farming methods using automation and chemistry are what we are after.

Category Three: Vehicles

Get out of the garage and in front of the people! Have you turned your ordinary car into a hackmobile? Converted an old school bus into a rolling data center? Does your car have more storage space than your home computer? We are talking more than just thumpy bumpy sound systems – we want to see your home made Batmobile. Atomic engines to power! Nessus scanners active, rolling Wi-Fi hotspots activated! Make it so!

Category Four: Demos

From the good ‘ol days of demo parties, show us what you’ve got! You will have your moment on stage to display your awesome. Remember the talent show scene from Revenge of the Nerds? We now have EL wire and wearable MIDI. Take us on a magic carpet ride of awesome that shows what your team can do. Unlike the other categories, you will perform at the awards party and no one will know until it’s over who will win this category. Clap your hands everybody, and everybody clap your hands!

Six months out from the event a panel of judges will select three submissions from each category for a total of twelve groups who will be invited to come to BSides Las Vegas and make their presentations. From there a second panel of judges hand-picked from the old , new, and weird school will judge the submissions with the winners being announced at an open party during the conference.

THE PRIZES:

Prize packages will be determined based on sponsor and donor contributions. At this time hundreds of trained squirrels are working to contact potential sponsors and contributors to make the rewards the best we can muster. As this develops we will keep you updated.

In each of the four categories, the prizes will be :

1st place : Amazing package of stuff and things, to further your awesome and make your innovations come true.

2nd place : A not as amazing as first place but still enough to give you toys to take back and build, innovate and make things happen.

3rd place: Guaranteed entry into the competition next year without having to go through preliminary judging.

Prizes for the first three categories will be awarded at an awards party to be held after judging. The demo competition and awards will happen as part of that party. Plans for live bands, DJ’s and sponsor demonstrations are in the works!

SPONSORS & DONORS:

Does the idea of a show of awesome and supporting hackerspaces & maker group innovation make you feel warm and fuzzy inside? Do you want to donate hardware from your company, or sponsor the event in other ways? Let us know! We will be reaching out in every way we can to ensure that the sponsors and donors as well as the participants are recognized in the forward march of human driven innovation. Security BSides Las Vegas, Inc. is a registered Nevada non-profit educational and charitable organization and the contest organizers are ready to work with you to help make this an amazing competition.

On tonight’s show we will be talking about our choices for talks this year at BSidesLV and DEFCON.

It was very difficult to pick only one talk per time slot. My picks below are of interest to me personally. I do not mean to imply that one topic or speaker is better than any other, but we all have to make a decision for each hour of the conferences. You’ll notice that I am more interested in security policy, incident response, and network defense rather than reverse engineering, and exploitation.

(I will update this post later for continuity and with direct links to each talk description)

I made a Google Calendar with the DEFCON Talks, BSides Talks, as well as the entertainment lineup for DEFCON. I hope you find it useful. I wanted to get the calendar easily on my phone and set reminders for talks I want to see. Please let me know of any corrections that are needed.

Here is the audio from the meetup on 2/6 if anyone is interested. We're releasing this on our feed for anyone who doesn't follow pauldotcom. It's not edited, just raw audio.Â Enjoy!
**HUGE THANKSRead More